Traditional dyeing devices for automatic blood smears or other tissue smears commonly include two kinds of technologies: multi-slide dyeing technology and single-slide dyeing technology.
Multi-slide dyeing refers to putting multiple prepared smears into a device that may be similar to a basket. The device containing multiple smears is dyed in a dyeing tank. Smears are taken out after dyeing according to rules of procedure, while dyeing solution within the dyeing tank may be reused. Since the quality of the dyeing solution may be reduced after being reused repeatedly, the dyeing effect of different batches of dyeing smears cannot be guaranteed, and this may affect the diagnosis of related clinical pathology. Additionally, in practical usage, due to emergency treatment or other reasons, certain smears may need to be dyed quickly, so the dyeing solution used for multiple smears may only be used for one or a few smears. As a result, the availability of the dyeing solution may be reduced, causing waste, and the cost for dyeing one smear may be greatly increased.
Single-slide dyeing refers to dyeing prepared smears piece by piece in an individual dyeing tank. The dyeing tank is designed to be as small as possible, and it can only accommodate one smear, so as to reduce the amount of dyeing solution in the dyeing tank. Compared to multi-slide dyeing, fewer reagents may be needed for single-slide dyeing when there are a few smears to be dyed. When there are a lot of smears to be dyed, an equivalent amount of reagents may be consumed by using either multi-slide dyeing or single-slide dyeing. However, the quality of dyeing using the single-slide dyeing technology is apparently better than that using the multi-slide dyeing technology. Unfortunately, the dyeing tank of a traditional single-slide dyeing machine cannot be recycled, which may cause resource waste and low efficiency.